I still remember the chill of fear. “I’ll have to tell Anna Wintour this will never catch on,” I thought as I sat in Cyberia, the first internet café in London, assigned by the editor-in-chief of American Vogue to swap fashion chit-chat with a reporter in New York. I recall the utter boredom as I waited for my co-reporter’s replies to appear, letter by letter, on the screen. In the end, I snuck out to a payphone, dialled Manhattan and we called the experiment off. Given designers in 1994 couldn’t even type, what possible use was this internet thing going to be to fashion?

In 1995, the organisers of Paris Fashion Week decided to nip an internet threat in the bud. Catwalk photographers had to sign declarations promising pictures were destined for named print publications only, to thwart the possibility of images being pinged through cyberspace to copyists in Asia. When an online start-up called First View (now the largest catalogue of fashion imagery on earth) broke the rules, threatening letters were dispatched, although Karl Lagerfeld had his own way of outsmarting those cyber-cowboys. Chanel models walked in figure-of-eights, so that photographers couldn’t get a clear shot. Google “Chanel” today and first up of over 45 million results is the official Chanel site (with clear catwalk shots).

In 1997, a fashion stylist called Natalie Massenet sounded me out about the possibility of joining me in Sydney, where I was then editing Vogue Australia. Years later, she told me my rejection spurred her on to launch an entrepreneurial venture, although when she pitched her plan, in 1999, to sell designer labels that you could neither touch nor try on, I was foxed - and not surprised when the far larger fashion site, boo.com, crashed and burned in May 2000. Now, over two million women a month log onto Net-a-Porter.

Today, it feels either quaint or, frankly, annoying, if a fashion brand is not available online. (The word “exclusive” really translates as “we’re still sorting out the website”). Yet challenges remain. Last July, Lazaro Hernandez, who is one half of the hot New York design duo, Proenza Schouler, pointed out at an industry pow-wow, that the speed at which images appear online makes clothes seem old by the time they reach stores. He said he and partner, Jack McCollough, were thinking about ways around this. The reaction from every designer busy tweeting and blogging to drive online sales traffic? “Get real, boys.”